http://www.jewishworldreview.com |Paris
Now that neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen has been so
overwhelmingly defeated in the decisive 2nd round of the
French presidential elections, France's real work
begins. President Jacques Chirac may have carried 82 per
cent of an odd-fellow coalition of the reasonable right,
center and left, but the fact is that veteran rabble
rouser Le Pen - a man who makes the late Benito
Mussolini seem suave - won 18 per cent of the national
vote (and more than 25 per cent in some areas of the
country).

Le Pen's pyrrhic success resulted from the frightening
fact that his xenophobia, racism and endemic anti-
Semitism appealed to a nervous French population
increasingly fearful about rising crime, unemployment
and immigration. Then there is the widespread open
disdain for Chirac whose five year presidency has been
marked by one scandal after another (one 2nd round
placard read "Vote for the crook, not the Fascist"). Add
to that Le Pen's demagogic conviction that France's
national identity is being hijacked by rabid pan-
Europeanism, and you find him attracting not just skin
heads and traditional right wingers - but ordinary
Frenchmen of all ages - albeit almost all of them White
and Christian.

The shift to the right is not a phenomenan limited to
France. In the Netherlands, that bastion of West
European tolerance, Pim Fortuyn, an openly gay high
living professor of sociology,l made an impressive
showing in last March's Rotterdam municipal elections
with his Liveable Netherlands Party. Running on an anti-
immigration platform, Fortuyn, whom the British press
has dubbed "The Dutch Dandy", announced that Holland
was "full" and Islam a "backward" religion. Holland's
legal bans on discrimination, he said, should be dumped.

Nor is this dangerous Euro-trend new. Austria's far-
right, anti-immigrant Freedom Party joined the Vienna
government two years ago and similar surprise gains by
neo-facist parties have been made in Belguim, Denmark,
Norway, Portugal, Switzerland, and Italy. All have run
on nationalist, law-and-order, anti-immigrant -- and
very often anti-E.U. platforms.

That may be a key factor. Increasing numbers of
Europeans fear that efforts by the European Union to do
away with borders and refashion traditional political,
social and economic relations among members will not
only rob them of their nation state, but will open the
flood gates to an increasing influx of refugees and
illegal immigrants from the Third World.

Le Pen, says JWR's British columnist Barbara Amiel, "sees two
dire threats: first, France's large number of
unassimilated, undigested Muslim immigrants; and second,
the usurping of French sovereignty by the European
Union."

Not coincidentally, Le Pen's other European counterparts
use much the same arguments.

This is not a pleasant time in Europe. Anti-Semitic
attacks - always a barometer of danger to democracy -
are on the rise especially in France. Most of the
perpetrators may be young angry, pro-Palestinian Muslims
who are also ironically scared of Le Pen - but they are
no longer Algerians, Turks, or Moroccans. Indeed, unless
you subscribe to Le Pen's philosophy, they too are now
French, German, Belgian, etc.

Le Pen himself, who once dismissed the Holocaust's gas
chambers as "a detail of history, speaks openly about
establishing "transit camps" for illegal immigrants
and "special trains" to deport "undesirables".

The odd fellow union that prevailed in the Presidential
election won't last in the June parliamentary
elections. France may well end up with another
cohabitation: a conservative president and a socialist
parliament. But it will almost certainly be a parliament
with serious representation from Le Pen's National
Front. Unless France and the rest of Europe deals with
the social, economic and governmental problems plaguing
it, the next time it may be someone else like him who
crawls out from under a rock, and successfully slithers
into the presidential palace.